The Author of Enter Helen on Why Helen Gurley Brown Is Such an Enigma

Several months ago, the 81-year-old feminist icon Gloria Steinem had a very bad day. In an interview with Bill Maher, Steinem accused young female Bernie Sanders supporters of, essentially, voting with their hormones. “When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,’ ” said Steinem, who was quickly and summarily raked over the coals by present-day feminists for her dismissiveness.

The gaffe, which will not and should not tarnish Steinem’s legacy, has mostly faded from memory, but I was reminded of it while reading Enter Helen, Brooke Hauser’s new biography about the late Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown.

Gurley Brown, who helmed Cosmo for more than three decades and authored such classics as 1982’s Having It All and 1962’s Sex and the Single Girl, is nothing if not controversial. On the one hand, long before second-wave feminists took up the cause, Gurley Brown encouraged women to cast off Eisenhower-era expectations of marriage, kids, and housewifery in favor of moving to the city, playing the field, and building careers. On the other hand, her way of spoon-feeding progress to her readers—whom she called her Cosmo girls—was frustratingly retro, and her brand of bubbly, sexy, girly-girl power was desperately out of tune with the zeitgeist of the 1970s women’s lib movement, of which Steinem was a leader.

“She was filled with contradictory messages,” said Hauser, chatting by phone from her home in western Massachusetts. “There were things in Sex and the Single Girl that were so ridiculous.” Among Gurley Brown’s tips for women seeking boyfriends: Head to your local Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or—and surely Steinem had this in mind—join both the Democrat and the Republican parties to cast a wider net. “You hope she’s joking, and she probably was,” said Hauser. “But there’s this message that resonated with me: Be an individual. Don’t live in your parents’ house anymore. Go to the big city and make something of yourself.”

That’s, in some ways, exactly what Gurley Brown did. She was born Helen Gurley in Arkansas in 1922, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a lawyer. Hers was a mostly middle class upbringing that she would later, for dramatic effect, recast as rural and impoverished. She attended a few years of business college, then became a secretary in Los Angeles, eventually rising in the ranks at an advertising firm to become a star copywriter, a sort of West Coast Peggy Olson. At 37, after years of sleeping around, often with married men—she once bragged about 178 notches on her bedpost—Gurley wed David Brown, a divorced magazine editor turned Hollywood producer.

It was Brown who encouraged his wife to write her 1962 best-seller, Sex and the Single Girl, a life manual for an expanding class of upwardly mobile, unattached working girls. And it was with her husband’s help that Gurley Brown, with zero editorial experience, fashioned herself a magazine editor and the savior of Hearst’s then flailing Cosmopolitan.

At Cosmo, Gurley Brown invented the mix that would become the magazine’s signature, crafting a product targeted toward the masses of readers who reminded her of herself: striving small-town middle American girls who made up in gumption for what they lacked in sophistication. She ran articles dispensing blow-job tips alongside features on the importance of abortion rights. She convinced a young Burt Reynolds to pose nude as a centerfold and a young Nora Ephron to get a makeover and write about it. She courted feminist writers like Steinem. (In less brilliant moments, she ran articles that claimed women were not able to contract HIV and suggested single girls head to Vietnam mid-conflict to pick up men.)

Gurley Brown only retired from Cosmo in 1997 (she retained the title of editor for the magazine’s international editions until her death in 2012), but in recent years, her name, says Hauser, once synonymous with trailblazing career women, has lost some of its oomph. “I think if you were to mention the name Helen Gurley Brown to a lot of young women of college age, many would not know who she is. To some, they picture her in her near-to-last days, aging but still wearing miniskirts and fishnet stockings and high heels.”

Hauser, who for years worked in magazines, and who thought of Gurley Brown as “someone people made fun of more than anything else,” became interested in the legendary editor’s story after reading her lively New York Times obituary. “I thought, This woman sounds fascinating: Why don’t I know more about her? She’s been forgotten by history in a way.”

EnterHelen will hopefully change that, though its author was less interested in reclaiming Gurley Brown’s legacy than in nailing it down. “My goal was to interview as many people as I possibly could who knew Helen, worked with her, loved her, hated her, to really create this portrait based not just on her own story, but on other people’s perceptions of her,” said Hauser. “I think she was very tricky, and I don’t necessarily believe the story that she told about herself.”

Hauser and I discussed what discoveries those interviews yielded, whether we can claim Helen Gurley Brown as a feminist, and why Sex and the Single Girl should be on everybody’s reading list.

You read Helen’s first book, Sex and the Single Girl, a few years ago, before deciding to write this book. What was so compelling about it?
It was published in 1962. I read it in 2012. The sex part of it was not at all shocking. It was completely groundbreaking when it came out: Helen was saying that single women do have sex, they enjoy it, they have it with multiple partners, and you should, too.

What resonated with me, as a 30-something woman, was her advice in terms of how to budget and save money, how to be an independent woman. That’s what was truly revolutionary. She was saying: Hold up! Don’t get married at 20. Date around; sleep around; put your career first. If you have a job as a secretary, become a lawyer, the head ad copywriter at your agency. Here’s how to do it. Then find the man of your dreams. Of course, you can be looking all along.

Helen made her name writing advice to single girls, but she was married to David Brown. You argue that, as a public figure, she was in some ways packaged by her husband.
I think David definitely packaged her, and so did Bernard Geis Associates, her original publisher for Sex and the Single Girl. But David had been an editor at Cosmopolitan already, and he was also a film producer whose career was on the rise. My feeling was he was the producer, and she was his biggest production of all time.

But you end on an interesting detail: David died first, and Helen, on his tombstone, wrote only: “Married to Helen Gurley Brown.” So he was branded by her, even as she was packaged by him.
Exactly. I do think he was the mastermind, but I also think they produced each other. Early on, she was more famous than he was. For a while in the ’60s, after Sex and theSingle Girl came out, he was Mr. Helen Gurley Brown. She certainly supported his career as much as he supported hers. But I also think he was more influential over her career than she was over his. The fact that he had been managing editor at Cosmo long before she became editor in chief, and that he continued to write cover lines when she was editor—that speaks to how involved he was.

When women’s lib rose to the fore in the ’70s, Helen’s primordial brand of female empowerment came into conflict with a much more political and rigorous feminist movement. In what ways do you feel that Helen was and was not a feminist?
That’s an interesting question. But I don’t want to say whether I think she was a feminist or not, because I don’t think that was the question I was trying to answer. I didn’t want to write a dissertation. I wanted to tell a story, and show how Helen Gurley Brown came along and rose above before there was a women’s movement. She was working outside any framework. She was working for herself.

A magazine like Ms. was working for the betterment of all women. Helen Gurley Brown, I think, was really looking out for herself and, in some ways, she encouraged Cosmo girls to do the same, to use their feminine wiles and whatever means necessary to advance their careers. If that included flirting with the boss, fine.

Gloria Steinem emerged as a leader of the women’s movement: She was young and beautiful and likeable. Then there’s Helen, who was much older, and just didn’t get it at times. I tell this story in the book that Gloria told me. One time there was a protest at Cosmo. It was getting disorderly and Helen called Gloria. She said,“Your people are downstairs, protesting Cosmo.” Gloria said,“Who are my people?” Helen said,“You know: women.”

It’s this idea that they were this other species that she had nothing in common with. I think she really looked out for number one.

Even though I said I didn’t want to make a case one way or the other, a feminist is just someone who believes in equality for men and women. I think she certainly believed in that. The word didn’t really exist when she was young, which is why we’re having a hard time applying it.

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Gurley Brown leading a staff meeting in the mid-1960s. She often stood in front of her desk, instead of sitting behind it.

Well, she had a hard time applying it, which is why you had a hard time applying it.
Yeah, it is kind of hard to describe someone that way when they themselves wrestled with the word. But I believe that she believed in equality between men and women. For me, the biggest evidence is that she educated people about abortion. Helen really believed in the woman’s right to choose. Part of that is that she really believed in the power of sex. She wanted her girls to be able to have sex without worrying about getting a child out of it. She was very outspoken about that.

You wrote a piece for The Millions about how Lena Dunham has helped reshape Helen’s legacy. Explain.
Lena’s memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, was loosely inspired by Having It All, Helen’s 1982 memoir/advice book. I’m a huge fan of Lena Dunham; I think Helen Gurley Brown owes her a big thank-you: If young women today do know who Helen Gurley Brown is, it’s probably because of Lena Dunham. I think Lena has the perfect take on Helen. She sees her for all the nuttiness; she knows that some of her advice is totally bonkers. She also seems to appreciate the real gems of wisdom.

Helen coined this word “mouseburger” to describe the plain girl in a small town, kind of like a diamond in the rough. Helen deserves credit for inspiring a whole generation of women to embrace their mouseburger. That’s the message of all of her books: You are the raw material, shape yourself, polish yourself, and go out there and get what you want.

There’s a sex positivity to Helen’s message that feels rather modern, even if much of what she espoused was pretty retro.
Sure. I think Roxane Gay touched on some of these issues with her book Bad Feminist. When I first heard that title, I immediately thought of Helen Gurley Brown. I think that’s probably a good way to describe her. She was encouraging you to get ahead in your career, but she was also telling you to give a fabulous blow job, well into her 80s. It was a huge grab bag,

Is it a progressive message? I don’t know. I think a lot of people continued to make fun of Helen Gurley Brown. I believe she deserves some of that teasing. But I also think she anticipated that yes you could be taken seriously in your career while loving to wear high heels and go out with men. I think for a while in the women’s movement, there was a real suspicion of wearing makeup, doing your hair, wearing anything other than blue jeans and Birkenstocks. In that sense, I think she was progressive. Of course, she brought the phrase “having it all” into the public consciousness. It drives a lot of women crazy. I don’t know what having it all means.

One of the most interesting things that I came across: I’m flipping through the pages of an issue of Cosmo from 1968, and all of a sudden, I see a woman who looks very familiar. She’s wearing this purple romper, showing off her legs, in a very seductive position. It’s Gloria Steinem. I later interviewed Steinem and decided to ask her about it. Apparently, she had agreed to do a shoot for Cosmo, but she thought it would be with the football player Jim Brown. When she showed up to the studio, instead there was this TV actor. They gave her this Cleopatra-inspired outfit that eventually she nixed. Then she got this other outfit with the bloomers. When she told me about it, she said,“I should have said I’m not comfortable with this and just walked off the set. But I think this was a situation in which I was a mouseburger.”

So in 1968, in other words, the framework of feminism didn’t really exist in the way it did a few years later. She didn’t have the confidence to stop what was happening; she didn’t have the script.

Was it a story about her? Or was she a model?
It was a story about the power of the beauty of a brunette. They named all these famous brunettes, from Cleopatra to Elizabeth Taylor to Gloria Steinem. It was known already that she had gone undercover as a Playboy bunny for Show magazine. That was mentioned in the article, but it wasn’t mentioned that she was an undercover journalist; it described her as a former bunny.

That captured the rift right there. When you were talking about how Helen rebranded David Brown at the end of life, she rebranded a lot of people. I think using Gloria in that way was Helen’s way of rebranding her as a Cosmo girl. She was the ultimate role model: She’s beautiful; she’s smart and attractive to men. And here she is in full color, a centerfold.

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Brooke Hauser

Photo: Karen Wise / Courtesy of HarperCollins

What haven’t I asked that you found really interesting about Helen?
The more I dug into Helen, there’s this story that emerges: She’s this poor little girl from Arkansas, rags to riches. What I found is that she really exaggerated a lot. Early on in my reporting, I flew out to Arkansas and met a cousin who was quite close to her—I got a very different picture. Helen used to describe her family as hillbillies. They weren’t. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father was a lawyer who later got into politics and worked at the capitol building in Little Rock. They were firmly middle class. Later her father died in a tragic elevator accident. She and her mother and sister moved to Los Angeles, where their insurance ran out, and they did become poor. But she just kind of glossed over all that and made it sound like she was this barefoot poor little girl from the sticks.

I found all of that really interesting, how she molded the myth of herself. Even by the end of writing the book, I felt like I didn’t really know her. I’m not alone. Most people didn’t really know her. Maybe David Brown did. But even David, in his book, Let Me Entertain You, said he found her to be enigmatic and hard to predict.

I write celebrity profiles all the time, and the goal is to try to find out what makes a person tick. With Helen, the more I dug, the more contradictions presented themselves. I just loved that about her. The reasons I’m so fascinated by her is that I’m still trying to figure her out. I want the reader to close the book and think: Do I like her? Do I hate her? Was she good for women? Was she bad for women? Does it matter? She raises more questions than she answers.